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More on the Fine Structure Constant
Bonker writes "Neat news from the Beeb. It turns out that data collected from observation of quasars indicates that the fine structure constant of the universe, aka 'Alpha', may have changed since the universe began. It may have been very slightly smaller than it is right now. The article hints that other constants we're familiar with, such as high, holy 'c', may also vary over time. Of course values can't have changed dramatically, because that would mean that low-weight atoms such as carbon would be unstable, and without carbon, there wouldn't be anyone around to measure the fine structure constant anyway." We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the team has continued to check their work for errors and hasn't found any yet.
www.goatse.cx
A while back, didn't some scientists manage to slow the speed of light down to something around 60 miles an hour in their lab? That's definitely not 180,000 m/s. Kind of interesting, did Einstein think C would be constant in his calculations?
While we are at it, we should also chek whether the value of pi is changing.
After that e, sqrt(2), 1 and 0.
For those of you who do not know humour: %$#%$
c is the speed of light in a vacuum. Light has different speeds through different mediums. Its just a matter of finding a medium to achieve you speed.
From what I remember the change in the alpha value, if there is one, would only be by about a billionth of what it is today.
Visit Kuro5hin. A site that generates content, not just repeats old news. See Matt's particle physics columns in particular.
Slashdot sucks monkey balls compared to Kuro5hin.
Why, of course! Geez, you'd think this place was home to a bunch of silicon-based dummies or something!
Today was a horrible day for slashdot, i am not trying to be a troll or anything but I am a die hard slashdot reader and It just seemed there is no good news today.. Oh well..
keanmarine.com
It's that same group saying the same thing again. Although I haven't reviewed their latest paper, I remember that I wasn't impressed with the statistical analysis of their data, as of the previous paper.
Personally, I won't find the evidence convincing untill another group takes some their own data and gets similar results. Given that many astronomers have similar sentiments, it seems that giving VLT time to the same group seems not the best use of VLT time.
Of course, if no other astronomers find the likelyhood of the discovery worth the effort of making the observations, then it may be difficult to get independant confirmation. Given that it would be a really big deal if true, I think that says a lot about how seriously the astronomical community takes these claims.
The number of dates I've had in the past year. Of course this tends to cause some division by zero errors.
--It's Pimptastic!--
The article actually doesn't really hint that 'c' is changing, which is good, because it's not clear what would be meant by that. The article says that several physicists have previously wondered if it could change. It then goes on to quote a modern physicist as saying that they were wrong.
I think c is best thought of as a man made constant. Just as I might say that there are 2.54 centimetres per inch, I can say that there are ~3*10^8 metres per second. Neither of these really contains any information about the universe outside of our perception of it. It is simply a statement of how one one system of measurement compares to another. 2.54 centimetres per second evaluates to unity (the number 1, with no units) if you actually evaluate it. Likewise, physicists commonly use unity as the speed of light, because in a very meaningful way, it is.
If I suddenly magically increased c by 10%, that would be indisinguishable from stretching the universe by 10% in every spacial direction. Consider that the speed of light it essentially unity, and that expressing it otherwise is really more a statement of our systems of measurement that we use than of physical reality. This makes it seem silly to say that I have magically increased c by 10% and makes it seem more reasonable to say that I have stretched the universe by 10% in every direction.
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
If I were guessing in the absense of any data, then I would agree with you. However, there is data which appears to preclude such large rates of change. There is a narrow range of values for the rate of change which is consistant with this data. However, if you beleive theconstraints placed by the Oklo reactor, then the changes have to be oscillatory.
All those Scoop sites kick ass. Adequacy is the most controversial site for hard news that I've ever come across.
-1, Whiny Virgin
;-)
Whoa, time to change those #defines to doubles.
Now perhaps there is some truth behind it, even if the reasons why are different. Anyway, should serve as a reminder to EVERYONE that understanding of reality changes, and what is fact today may be discovered as myth tomorrow.
I have decided that for science to progress, it is absolutely essential that people be willing to accept that everything they believe may be wrong, so that they are open to new possibilities. On the other hand, they must not be quick to accept new theories, and examine it properly. There are too many people in all walks of life who become stubbornly attached to a belief because of one reason or another. This kind of attitude inhibits the progress of scientific discovery.
Talking about creation and evolution, almost everyone has religious reasons for wanting to believe either side. If there was debate on whether quarks were really the smallest component, almost nobody would care about the outcome for religious reasons. However, evolution gives people the power to defend atheism, and creation gives people the power to defend creation. Almost everyone has a religious/philosophical reason for wanting an answer to the question of origins.
Quoth the article:
"If this is correct, it will radically change our view of the Universe. We have to be cautious but it could be revolutionary. We have seen something in our data - but is it what we think?"
I like it when scientists talk about their theories in this manner. On one hand you have a whole body of researchers, scientists, and journals who are so afraid to rock the status quo that they refuse to research (or publish) controversial information. On the other, you have scientists and/or crackpots who are so paranoid and skittish towards working within the peer reveiw system that we'll probably never gain access to their research, some of which may be quite important and revolutionary.
(I quit my physics major a year in and switched to CS. At what point do 'paranoia' and 'ego-building' become required courses?)
I think this is a nice middle ground. These guys have announced a neat finding, with the caveat that they are still in a thourough 'error-checking' mode and are looking for problems with their own research and are implicitly inviting others to do the same.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Check this out!
l l% 20you%20niggers
http://www.amazon.com/us-all-thanks.cgi?email=a
amazon is broke
Is anyone else irritated because the Slashdot icon in the upper right hand corner no longer sends you back to "www.slashdot.org" but instead to the topic page (Example: "science.slashdot.org" or "ask.slashdot.org)? It's bugging the shit outta me.
Can't spell
Can't conjugate
Can't proofread
and now...
Can't keep consistency.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
NO JAM!
If C isn't constant, then perhapse you can shine that flashlight off the front of the ships at near light speed and achieve faster than light with light itself ^__^
I never claimed to be a physics expert, just an expert in physics
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Seastead this.
> The BBC site doesnt work for me. It couldnt be /.ed already?
;)
No... alpha changed and the article ceased to exist
I have a shitty sig!
There goes my theory about the universal constants containing a message from the Creator of the universe. Guess I'll have to start working on that old universal field theory again.
....does that mean we all have to go back to programming in Cobol? ;-)
-marc
See Ma! I told ya t' universe was gawn t' hell in handbasket.
alpha is the coupling constant for the electromagnetic force.
In other words, it determines the "strengh" of the electromagnetic force. It is important because
a) it has no units (it's just a number, approximately 1/137)
b) it is easy to measure to a great degree of accuracy
c) it can be measured using a variety of different experiments
d) many fundamental phyiscal constants (such as c - the speed of light in a vacuum, e - the charge of an electron, and h - the Planck constant.
So a change in alpha would mean a change in one of the fundamental constants of physics.
For more information, you can read NIST's wonderful description.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
in your favourite format.
I used my Q powers about 100 billion years ago to alter this constant to impress a lady Q -- forgot to change it back -- I will get right on it.
"You dont ask how some things are done, you simply do them." - Q
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
"Of course values can't have changed dramatically, because that would mean that low-weight atoms such as carbon would be unstable, and without carbon, there wouldn't be anyone around to measure the fine structure constant anyway."
Who is to say that carbon has always been stable... maybe one of the more unstable elements today was the stable element at the time and has become unstable as a result of the change in the constant value.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Over the past two years, I've developed a decent "haha, only serious" model of the universe. It works sort of like this:
About two years ago, Slashdot ran a story talking about the theoretical upper limit of computer speed (sorry, couldn't find a link). Basically, the idea was to convert the mass of your computer to energy to allow ALL of it to work for you. This energy, in the form of light, will create intereference patterns - just like you did with the two slits in 5th grade science - and that's how the computer (which now resembles a small star) does it's computing kinda thing (gross oversimplification of what the article said, but that's the gist). Now if you compress enough energy into a singularity, you have pretty much (and the "pretty much" is important) infinite computing power (due to time dialation and so on).
Well, it just so happens that God has one of these things on his desk. Our universe is a program running inside this uber-computer that resembles a black hole.
Earlier I said the processing power of this computer would be "pretty much" infinite. Well - it isn't big enough to handle every particle in the universe simultaneously. Some of the universe is "swapped out". Ever sit down at the computer to read slashdot, and whammo, four hours have gone by? Wonder what happened to the time? You were swapped out, that's what.
There also appears to be problems with the branch prediction unit of this computer. Deja vu? branch prediction made an error, and the queue had to be recalculated. Ever reached in your pocket and pulled out a $5 bill you didn't know you had? bad branch prediction.
If a tree falls in the woods, and no one was there to witness, does it make a sound? No. It didn't even fall. Actually, it wasn't even there. Years later, when a witness comes upon the site, all the events since the last witness came by are quickly approximated and the end results are what the new witness sees. What constitutes a witness? People? squirrels? I dunno. Doesn't matter, really.
Can't remember if you left the oven on? Well, both options are possible, and both have been approximated. The appropriate one will be chosen when someone sees the end result (either your house burns down, or it doesn't).
Lots of strange events can be explained with this model of the universe:
Reincarnation/past lives/Ghosts? Bad garbage collection, or the Divine Coder forgot to unallocate memory.
ESP? Packet snooping.
Why can't objects with mass go faster than the speed of light? Think of everything like an object in C++. If you have a "mass" property, your object is too big to fit through the "bus" in one "fetch cycle", so your "position" property can't be updated as fast as say...a photon, which fits through the bus in one cycle.
Why is the rules of Quantum Mechanics so strange/Planck's Constant? In the world of computers we know, what's smaller than a bit? Looking at things on that small a scale, we're seeing the individual bits flip from 1 to 0 in God's workstation. Of course it will look odd, and it won't mean much when compared to the world as we perceive it. Combine that with the fact that most of the universe is approximated, and you end up with really strange things happening on that small a scale.
Why are some people luckier than others? Not all people call the same random number generator, or maybe some people can call it with a certain "seed value".
Bermuda triangle? think of something like a bad sector on a disk, or a faulty RAM stick - of course, the computer this runs on doesn't use disks or RAM sticks, but it's still a decent analogy.
Jesus? You play Quake/Unreal/The Sims, don't you? It just so happens that God's version of "The Sims" is a hell of a lot better than yours.
Don't think of this as something akin to the movie "The Matrix" - because these rules we live by in this universe can't be broken. There's no dodging bullets. there's no agents... We were created parts of this simulation, and are ourselves simulated and no more or less real than the world we live in - and there's no way to get out of this simulation.
However, maybe there is a way to use the rules to our advantage? But to do that, you need to know the real rules behind the physics we see. We'd need to know what's happening to those individual bits in the processor. If we can affect those often enough, maybe we could effectively beat the rules...?
More important is this question: Were we created on purpose, or is this entire universe of ours that exists inside God's Workstation meant to be something else entirely? Maybe we were supposed to model plasma dynamics, and the system taking on intelligence was a by-product of the genetic algorithm that was used? Or maybe we're something like an AI experiment?
I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that no other science has quantities in it that have names as cool as the fine structure constant or the permeability of free space.
From the article, it seems that the thing they are measuring to understand the nature of how this 'constant' changed is the light that eminated from the rest of the universe that is just reaching earth. The older light appears to show matter generally acting in one way, and the newer light appears to show matter acting in another way.
How did they isolate this one factor in sub-atomic formulae as the only feasible explanation? How did they eliminate things like universal gravity effects (gravity appears to be instant and with unlimited range), forces acting on the light over billions of years, or changing nature of the stars as that portion of the universe ages, thus changing the light coming from them?
This does qualify as one of those 'extrordinary claims' that themselves need both extrordinary proof and extrordinary qualification of what they are really stating.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Also, gravitational effects would shift all of the absorption lines they see uniformly, whereas what is observed is a relative shift between different sets of lines in the same atoms, which requires changes in the fine structure constant.
-------- The thought plickens....
Everyone seems to love carbon. It is highly overrated if you ask me. Hydrogen, now there's an element...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
You look at the ratios of intensities of various spectral lines. The ratio of intensities of the i-->j transition and the i-->k transition in some particular atom is set solely by quantum mechanics. Since the potential energy appearing in Schrodinger's eqn for electron transitions is the electromagnetic potential, you end up with something that depends only on quantum electrodynamics. Which means you are measuring the one coupling constant of that theory, which is alpha, the fine structure constant. All the other dependencies drop out.
const double alpha = 1.0/137;
hack_universe() {
*(double *)&alpha += 1e-9;
}
// don't call this; the universe requires
// double-word aligned doubles
crash_universe() {
*(double *)(1+(char *)&alpha)) += 1e-9;
}
Maybe I'm missing something from the article, but I don't think that "constants" like alpha changing is a new idea (though it is very cool if alpha changing over time can be directly observed like this). Changing coupling "constants" is already a part of the established "Standard Model" of physics, and is an essential feature of Grand Unified Theories.
Grand Unified Theories rely on all of the interaction strengths for all known forces (Strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and sometimes gravity) becoming the same at some energy scale earlier on during the formation of the Universe. In the present Universe, the strong force that holds quarks together is much stronger than the electromagnetic force, but if GUTs hold true then they were much closer earlier on.
See here for a graph illustrating this effect, or rather its failure for one particular GUT theory. This is the first I found using a quick google search for "GUT" and "coupling constant"; it is a common plot shown for papers on GUTs in general.
Its been a couple of years since I studied this stuff. I'd be interested to know if this article is pointing to something new theoretically.
The Oklo reactor you refer to tests a quantity that depends on alpha, and some other combination of parameters. This makes it a more ambiguous test as, for example, a shift in the proton/electron mass ratio or something could affect the results.
Everyone knows that constant's value is 42.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Gravity is not an instantaneous force, it propogates at the speed of light.
This isn't necessarily true: The Speed of Gravity - What the Experiments Say
http://carbane.eng.yale.edu/alpha.html
AA6E
Fiat Lux.
Or would it make the light generated within the flashlight stay in the flashlight (as the source is moving in the same speed as the product) such that we would never see it until we slow down the ship?
Wasn't the universe created in 4000 B.C.? Could a right-thinking American set us straight on this issue, please?
Who is is to say is the guy who measures the stability of carbon in old stars, that's who. And it has been done already, to a high degree of accuracy, probably thousands of times by thousands of grad students.
It is called science, and a nodding familiarity with it would relive you of the urge to ask idiot questions like this one.
Go study! y'dork!
here and here.
Finally a changing speed of light is predicted in a DSR approach here.
This is interesting news.
Since modern attempts to unify the fundamental physical forces began, gravity in particular has presented a difficulty for scientists, and it appears that the solution may be changes in constants we previously believed to be, well, constant.
This could have far-reaching implications for the way we think about science, and especially our understanding of what science can tell us. It seems possible that our disciplines of science and natural history might actually be driven farther apart, as we lose any reliable base indicators on which to base assumptions about the past.
For some in the scientific orthodoxy, this is anathema and they will fight it tooth and nail to the bitter end, for it forces them to accept a reality that they have long denied. The liberals constantly tell us that because of the relatively slow travel of light from distant galaxies, it must have been traveling for long periods of time, and the universe must therefore be quite old (billions and billions... you know the drill). Now their rationalizing will be laid bare and they must admit that the Bible has again withstood vigorous attempts at disproof, that they have a Creator and are therefore accountable to Him.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
But does this support (if either) Setterfield or Humphries, who have quite different hypotheses.
Serious question.
Really! A perfect vacuum? No one has ever measured c in that.
Let alone that the density of the virtual photon sea that has been demonstrated for some years via certain ZPE effects.
Is that "thinner" between galaxies? Between stars out beyond the Kuiper belt?
Who knows?
What has been measured is the speed of light in low Earth orbit, which is NOT a vacuum, whether in terms of particles or EM fields.
Can you not disagree without engaging in ad hominems? If not, don't bother posting. You will be moderated down.
Please note that it's always possible to say "maybe there's some other unknown explanation" for any phenomenon... the best we can do is rule out all known alternatives. (And even if there were some other explanation, it would probably be labelled as "variation in the `effective' fine structure constant", since it has the same observed effects as an actual variation.
A more useful number for me would be the fraction of successful dates (*1), which, while non-zero, can be seen to converge to within espilon of zero as T goes to T(divorce) + infinity. We can represent this value by the lowercase Greek letter sigma (*2).
Raise sigma to the power of the money spent on those dates (which, perhaps counter-intuitively, appears to be inversely related to sigma itself), and we have a value that can be substituted for zero for most practical purposes, while remaining safe for division, though it may strain the limits of floating-point precision.
--
(*1) For any given meaning of "successful". I'll leave it to you sick monkeys to guess whether I mean what you think I mean.
(*2) For reasons that should be obvious.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}